Native Plants Can Be Invasive

I finally found a plant that will take over tall fescue – wingstem, but I’m not sure I like it. Let me explain.

Both plants are invasive, tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea) is a non-native invasive plant; wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia) is a native plant that is invasive.

The author with best friend Dexter in Wingstem “grove”. This Wingstem grove is clearly at least eight feet tall and has taken over. It is a monoculture.

Invasive Plant Definition

What is an invasive plant? One definition is “any plant species whose introduction to the ecosystem under consideration will cause economic or environmental harm or create health risks”. Both native and non-native plants could fit this definition.

There are lots of examples of non-native plants that cause economic or environmental harm such as kudzu, “burning bush”, Canadian thistle, teasle, tree of heaven, nut grass, johnsongrass and tall fescue. It’s an endless list and each can cause economic and environmental damage. What about native plants? Can they also be invasive?

Goldenrod is a Native Invasive

Goldenrod (Solidago) is a good example of a native plant that can be invasive. It can also be a great plant in your garden. It has beautiful blooms and attracts many beneficial

Wingstem stems have “wings” running longways along its stem.

insects; however, it can take over your whole garden. To the nursery industry or to cattle farmers it can be an aggressive plant taking over space that more desirable plants could have occupied. Goldenrod occupying the space where one wants native purple coneflower would have to be pulled up by hand, killed with herbicides or controlled with some other method. It can literally take over a flowerbed or take over acres of pasture.

Another example of a potential native invasive is the Black Cherry tree. Granted it is a grand tree with gorgeous wood and fruit for wildlife but on a cattle farm, it is undesirable and invasive along hedgerows. Its wilted leaves are deadly to cattle.

Going Native is Not Maintenance Free

In our riparian buffer along Middle River, we are trying to maintain an ecosystem that is native with as much biodiversity as possible which includes trees, shrubs, forbs, and grasses – all native, of course. It isn’t easy.

First we fought tall fescue and now we are fighting wingstem – it’s taking over! Wingstem is a delightful native plant and we welcome some of it but we don’t want a monoculture of it. The cows would eat some of it but we don’t want our cows in the riparian area – they would also eat the trees we are nursing along. Our goal is bio-diversity and a cleaner stream. I so want to “de-list” Middle River from the state’s “dirty waters” list.

Wingstem blooms.

We are now mowing as much of the wingstem as possible – we will never get it all. When it re-sprouts I am going to apply an herbicide to attempt to kill it. In late November we will plant native shrubs and trees in the same place the wingstem was. It won’t be the end of them. You can’t plant your shrubs and trees and just walk away. Tending to a native community takes a lot of maintenance.

15 Comments

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Bobby-We like wingstem despite the fact that it will occasionally develop dense patches. The monarch butterflies love it(as do other pollinators) when they migrate through. Another great attribute is that it is one of the few plants that DEER WILL NOT EAT!! It is also incredibly drought tolerant and grows on dry woodland edges where little else will. Wildlife need herbaceous areas so while it is fine to manage it and thin it (and work on establishing other herbaceous flowering plants there that you favor ) I hope you won’t convert all/most of the area to trees and shrubs.I also think it would be better to spray it now as opposed to mowing it for the sake of box turtles and other ground critters that are active at this time. You are right that it sometimes takes a lot of work to manage non-crop areas if/until they become woodlands which may be why tree buffers are so popular-once established they need little attention. Thanks for bringing attention to this useful and tough native plant!

Ned, thanks for your excellent comments. Well noted my friend. We have so much wingstem there’s no way we will not have a significant amount. I think all this rain we’ve had really pushed it over the limit. We like some and have saved some “groves” here and there. So glad to hear from you.

It is interesting to note that many of our conservation plants promoted over the last sevrral decades are now considered invasive species. We actively removed many of them from the FOTG when I worked in California.

I had a prodcuer recently tell me how well his planting of multiflora rose was creating excellent deer habitat, another example of a conservation shrub once promtoed by the Soil Conservation Service. That and Autumn Olive are taking over the countryside here.

My fence rows are full of Black Cherry. The cattle and goats both seek it out and eat the leaves to self-medicate themselves against parasites I suppose although I have no proof that is what they’re actually doing. The goats love it and eat plenty.

Well managed fescue not allowed to go to seed can be an excellent pasture grass and one of the best forages here in the Fall when it does not go to seed. It makes up less than 20% of our pasture forages. At that rate, even if it does head out, there is not enough in the mix of forages we have to cause any major concerns. Quackgrass has been the biggest problem here and very much so in our gardens.

Bobby, You are certainly right about some native species that can cause havoc and distresses by their aggressiveness. I have always hesitated to call them “invasive” because of the confusion that creates. It seems like addressing them as “aggressive” is a better terminology. Another beautiful fall vine to add to the list is Clematis autumnalis. It is beautiful with a fragrance of gardenias. It has a small white flower in the fall. It climbs all over trees and other plants. It is dispersed by wind and animals. The seed has long sticky tendrils. I planted some about 6 years ago, realized my mistake and took it out by hand and shovel. It still shows up in my woods as isolated vines. I really like the plant and enjoy the beauty but not worth the risk of the woods on the creek in my backyard. It is very “aggressive” and should be listed as such.

Bobby, I have been so busy trying to remove this awful plant that I have not had chance to reply to your excellent post until now. First, let me say that we have 2 wingstem species, the alternifolia, which on our land is not so invasive and the occidentalis (?)with opposite leaves which has truly taken over our land as you know. We first noticed it about 15 years ago in the corner of our land and thought what pretty yellow blooms they had. Since then they have invaded our 30 acres. Over the years, I have planted many trees and wildlife corridors with fruiting and nutting shrubs and am also growing the latest American Chestnut/Chinese chestnut backcross trees from the American Chestnut Foundation. Everything is under threat from verbesina. If any of your readers want to come and witness this horror, they are welcome to come here. As we use very little poison on our land, we have experimented with digging out this plant by the the roots (very hard work) and are planning a burning experiment to see if that kills or encourages them.

Carol, thank you so much for your input. I don’t have a silver bullet answer but I think you should try to incorporate some tillage on a small portion and since your land is a bit steep it would have to be on the contour and in a narrow band say not more than 60 feet wide. It should be mowed now and then plowed on the contour and left fallow all winter to expose those invasive roots to the cold.

Responding two years later! I myself am doing some ecological restoration in a SE Pennsylvania watershed preserve. I am starting from a big deficit in this field succession space, working through a lot of privet, bush and Japanese honeysuckle, multiflora rose, asiatic bittersweet, and other troublesome plants. Pulling out the invasives sometimes means nothing but poison ivy is left..

Thinking about natives becoming aggressive, it speaks to me of a habitat out of balance. From the soil chemistry to the insects and parasites and other colonizers/consumers, the habitat is likely a completely strange place causing some good plants to behave badly. To our eyes the plant is growing in its historic location. That should be good enough, eh? Hopefully with time the rest of the puzzle will fill back in. Happy planting / restoring

Daisy, thanks for posting even two years later. A habitat out of balance for sure! Since then, things have diversified a little. Jump starting a forest into a fescue sod is not easy but it is well worth it.

Well I am an even later responder than Daisy, but that is the nature of the internet. I looked up yellow wingstem (crownbeard) to see if other people have my problem. To the first commenter (long gone) who says deer will not eat it, yes that is true. But the problem with that is that deer will eat everything else leaving you with just yellow wingstem (and Japanese stilt grass in my case). The wingstem and stilt grass are somewhat symbiotic as the wingstem provides some shade to the stilt grass and supports it and the stilt grass creates a tangled mess to slow down the wingstem weeding. Our very rainy June and early July after a wet winter and spring really got both going well. A very dry August has caused some wingstem wilt on the sunny south slope.

The key to many weeds and wingstem for now is controlling the spread. There are large patches thick with wingstem, but there are areas that are not invaded or just have a few. Those are my main focus. Then I trim back the edges patches and replace it with anything including plain old mulch (plant something else later). The very wet soil in early summer made it actually possible to pull out the wingstem roots. Even then it was not any more than 50% successful. Wingstem is too tough for my weedwhacker so mostly I break off the flowering stems late in the season before they go to seed (not exactly sure of the timing, but I know winter is way too late).

Now with the new 80 volt battery weedwhacker I think I will have better success hitting the wingstem on my five acres all season. There are obviously worse weeds even if the price is wingstem monoculture.

I think it’s misleading to call native plants “invasive”. Invasive is both a scientific and a political term, and locally native plants fit neither of these uses. I think it is more truthful and useful to describe these plants (things like wingstem or Canada goldenrod) as aggressive.

There are important distinctions, both scientific, and political, between invasive species and aggressive native species.

Ecologically speaking, aggressive native species are often one of the most ecologically beneficial species out there. Wingstem and goldenrod are two great examples in that both plants support a staggering array of insect biodiversity. Both plants attract numerous insect pollinators, but there are also a ton of insects that eat the other parts of the plant, as well as insects and other animals that eat the insects that eat these plants. These insect herbivores also help to keep these plants in check in a wild ecosystem.

If you see huge monocultures of wingstem in the wild, you will find that they are usually short-lived. As the plant becomes abundant, herbivores increase, to the point that the plant is kept in check enough that other plants can compete with it. I recently visited two parks, one in DE and one in PA, where wingstem was super abundant, and in neither of these parks had it formed monoculture stands, rather, it was growing together with many other plants. Furthermore, all plants in the area showed considerable evidence of insect damage–which means there was a lot of insect biomass in the area to support birds and other predators of insects.

If you are cultivating this plant in a yard and it’s forming a monoculture, the problem is probably the ABSENCE of other plants more than anything else. A lot of times, gardeners will introduce one aggressive plant and complain that it dominates, when the problem is that they’re trying to grow it alongside other plants that aren’t as aggressive or well-adapted to the conditions.

The scenario with non-native plants is very different. I’ve seen stands of truly invasive (aggressive non-native species) form true monocultures which persist for years. Garlic mustard and poison hemlock are examples of plants like this. I’ve seen huge monoculture stands of these plants where no insects are eating the plants at all.

I think it’s important to acknowledge the distinction between aggressive native plants, and invasive plants. Aggressive native plants might be a pest in gardens, or even to human agriculture, but they usually have a positive effect on wild ecosystems. Invasive plants, on the other hand, are often treated as attractive or desired landscape plants for others, they include agricultural plants (canola oil is grown from the same plant as the weed called “field mustard), cultivated flowers (lesser celandine was introduced as a flower), street trees (Norway maple is a classic example). Just because something isn’t aggressive in your garden doesn’t mean it won’t become invasive in the wild.

I think it’s critically important to use these words accurately and precisely so that we avoid making future mistakes of introducing more plants that turn out to be damaging to wild ecosystems. Planting aggressive native plants might cause your garden to get overrun, but it’s not going to cause harm to surrounding wild ecosystems, it might even be helping to protect or restore them.

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